Weird week

Well, my week has gone to pot with cancelled meetings and rapidly changing deadlines. Monday was a good busy day with work heading into a client, quickly turned round and revised.

Tuesday I was supposed to be at the RAF Museum in Cosford putting together a piece on the new National Cold War Exhibition for an aerospace website. But, as I was about to step out the door, the PR called to say they had a major power failure and the exhibition was to be closed for the day! That was hard on the heels of another client calling to say my meeting on Wednesday in Scotland was postponed (again). That one bit in a manner familar to any freelancer out there. The meeting has now been twice postponed and has moved out from Feb 6 to the 14th and now the 27th. So, work I thought I'd have completed before the end of this month now won't even start until the beginning of March. Scheduling, no doubt, will be fun. Also, I'm now carrying nearly £200 of expense for the original flight and two subsequent changes to the flight details. I haven't been formally briefed on the job yet, and there's certainly no purchase order - and this is a company that doesn't pay for at least 60 days after receiving an invoice. It's nothing critical, since I think it'll turn out to be a pretty good job, but it left a hole in the middle of my week - and more hassle for my cashflow.

Sod's law dictated, of course, that I took another call yesterday from someone who works in Edinburgh looking to brief me on a completely different job - I could have been there to go it all face to face. Now it's a matter of phone bashing and a partial brief in London next week.

Then to put a seal on things for this week, I'd been waiting for a large chunk of web site material to edit to arrive in my inbox yesterday evening, and had set aside much of today and tomorrow to complete the work. I've now been told I won't get that until the 21st.

Everyone had a really good reason for shifting work, meetings and timescales over the last few days - it's just freelancer law that I'm on the receiving end this time round. I have two other tasks I can get on and complete today - and now know the pipeline's absolutely full from Monday for about the next four weeks. I just felt like tearing a few strands of hair out yesterday.